Astrophysicists Observe How Black Holes Are Fueled

Astrophysicists Observe How Black Holes Are Fueled

By combining the light of three powerful infrared telescopes, an international research team has observed the active accretion phase of a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy tens of millions of light years away, a method that has yielded an unprecedented amount of data for such observations. The resolution at which they were able to observe this highly luminescent active galactic nucleus has given them direct confirmation of how mass accretes onto black holes in centers of galaxies.

“Our main interest is to learn how supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies are fueled, so that they grow to the enormous million to billion solar mass objects we see today,” said Sebastian Hoenig, a postdoctoral researcher at the UC Santa Barbara Department of Physics, and one of the astrophysicists on the team led by Gerd Weigelt, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.